“TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
― The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
― The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
“That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying,”
― The Grifters
― The Grifters
“Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them.”
― The Elephant Tree
― The Elephant Tree
“The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.”
― The Solar Anus
― The Solar Anus
“Hate can be just as intimate as love.”
― Save Yourself
― Save Yourself
Alphonso’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alphonso’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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